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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (72073)	2/7/2003 5:08:38 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

A Clip from Sullivan: RAINES WATCH" How the Times spins: You can, I suppose, defend the New York Times' editorial position on Iraq, which is that we should hand over the problem to the Security Council and wait for a Democratic president whose war they could support. But it's hard to defend their attempt to minimize international support for the war. Last week, the biggest news around the world was the European split between France and Germany and all the surrounding nations. That story was allowed to miss a news cycle and then buried. Then yesterday, we have the Times' usually sensible Judith Miller saying the following in an online chat: "I think that for many Americans, Secretary Powell's presentation will be persuasive. But I doubt that it will be convincing to much of the world, and especially the Europeans who are historically conditioned, given their own horrendous experiences, to oppose war. Arabs will continue to fear that unpredictable side effects of a war against Iraq. So far, only Britain and some 7 other smaller eastern European states firmly side with the U.S.. I don't see that changing because of his presentation, but we'll have to see." Only Britain and seven other smaller eastern European states? How about Italy, the fourth biggest economy in Europe? How about Spain? And Australia? How about the 10 new countries that signed on to war on Wednesday night? In the E.U. a clear majority of member nations back the United States. And in the Security Council, the vote on Resolution 1441 was unanimous. The Times knows that the only way it can keep Saddam in power is by minimizing foreign support for the coalition to disarm him. So minimize it does.

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (72073)	2/7/2003 5:17:43 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Mark Steyn hopes for the end of the UN: The Libya vote is instructive. There are 53 members of the Human Rights Commission. Thirty-three voted for the Colonel. Three voted against — the United States, Canada and Guatemala (God bless her). Seventeen countries abstained, including Britain. Is that really the position of Her Majesty’s Government? Not really, and they’ve all manner of artful explanations for why the vote went as it did — it was the Africa bloc’s turn to get the chairmanship, they only put up one candidate, the EU guys had all agreed to vote as a bloc, they didn’t want to appear to snub Africa, blah blah. So the net result of filtering Britain’s voice up through one multilateral body (the EU) into another (the UN) is that you guys are now on record as having no objection to the leading international body on human rights being headed by a one-man police state that practises torture and assassination and has committed mass murder within your own jurisdiction. That’s a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with UN-style multilateralism. There aren’t a lot of Gaddafis, but their voice is amplified because of the democratic world’s investment in UN proceduralism. Some of those abstainers are just Chiraquiste cynics: any time the Americans don’t get their way is a victory for everybody else. Others believe the world would be a genuinely better place if it was run through global committees staffed by a transnational mandarin elite of urbane charmers: that’s an undemocratic concept, and one shouldn’t be surprised that it finds itself in the same voting lobby as the dictatorships. In an ideal world, you’d like the joint run by Mary Robinson and Chris Patten, but at a pinch Gaddafi and Assad will do: transnationalism is its own raison d’être. If the postwar UN was a reflection of hard power, the present-day UN is a substitute for it. ...What should replace the UN? Well, some people talk about a ‘caucus of the democracies’. But I’d like to propose a more radical suggestion: Nothing. In the war on terror, America’s most important relationships have been bilateral: John Howard hasn’t dispatched troops to the Gulf because the Aussies and the Yanks belong to the same international talking shop; Mr Blair’s helpfulness isn’t because of the EU but, if anything, in spite of it. These relationships are meaningful precisely because they’re not the product of formal transnational bureaucracies. Promoters of the ‘Anglosphere’ — a popular concept in the US since 9/11 — must surely realise there’d be little to gain in putting the Anglo-Aussie-American relationship through the wringer of a joint secretariat. In fact, the whole idea of multilateral organisations feels a bit last millennium. With hindsight, institutions like the UN seem to have more to do with the Congress of Vienna than with the modern world, a hangover from the pre-democratic age when contact between nations was limited to the potentates’ emissaries. That’s why it so appeals to both the Euro-statists and the dictators, but, in the era of the Internet and five-cents-per-minute international phone rates and instant financial transfers and cheap vacations in the Maldives, the bloated UN bureaucracy seems at best irrelevant and at worst an obstruction to the progress of international relations. I’m all in favour of the Universal Postal Union and the Berne Copyright Convention (America was a bit late signing that one), but they work precisely because Sy Kottik and his chums weren’t involved. The non-nutcake jurisdictions came together, and others were invited to sign on as they saw fit. That’s why they work and that’s why they endure. But if I’ve learned anything since September 11, it’s that the nation state is the only thing that’s there for you in the end. I’m a Canadian who’s spent much of his life in the United Kingdom and the United States, and I never really considered these countries as foreign to each other. But they are, in very profound ways. The 49th parallel is both the longest undefended border in the world and also the busiest, in terms of cross-border trade. But the line is real nonetheless. Transnational institutions should reflect points of agreement: Americans don’t mind the Toronto Blue Jays playing in the same baseball league because they’re agreed on the rules; a joint North American Public Health Commission, on the other hand, would be a bureaucratic boondoggle seeking to reconcile two incompatible systems. That’s what happens when you put America, Denmark, Libya and Syria on a human rights committee, and that’s why it’s wrong for the US to seek the endorsement of the Security Council when it’s acting in its vital national interest. So I say: go ahead, Jacques, make my day. Wield your veto, and let the Texan cowboy and his ever-expanding posse go it ‘alone’. I don’t know whether a haughty Gallic ‘Non!’ would be enough to finish off the UN once and for all — these institutions are like those nuke-proof cockroaches — but I do know that another UN-sanctioned war would enshrine the principle that only the UN can sanction war. telegraph.co.uk